She Was Strawberry Blonde
by Psychedelica
Summary: It's Rose's first daughter, but not the Doctor's. Angst, HC.


**Disclaimer: Seriously folks, if I owned Doctor Who, this story below would be on the TV right now instead of a website.**

**A/N: Like all fanfic authors out their, I do love a nice review once in a while. It would be lovely of you to just put together a word or two about this story, but I'm not your boss. It's not like if you don't, I'll send round my thugs to beat the living daylights out of you. :) That was a joke, by the way. Please don't sue me or anything. I'm not pretty enough to go to jail . . . ;)**

**Just for the record, this is set in Pete's World a short while after the Doctor dropped the Meta-Crisis there. I don't really have a timeframe in mind, but 10.5 and Rose have married and just had their first child together. Five years, maybe? Less? More? You decide.**

**It starts off light, but gets a bit sadder and very much deeper. And it's the UK Mars bars, in case you were wondering. I never even knew the USA had different ones until about an hour ago when I Wiki-ed them. So that's a layer of nougat, then a layer of caramel, all covered in chocolate, and now my stomach's rumbling. While I go off and raid the shops for a Mars bar, ENJOY!  
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><p>"John, we need a name."<p>

"Hm. I'm thinking."

"No you're not! You're eating chocolate!"

John rolled his eyes in irritation. "Is it so impossible for me to be eating chocolate _and _thinking?"

"With you, yes! Especially if that chocolate is a Mars bar."

His eyes lit up. "But they're so incredible! Some clever person has combined chocolate, caramel and nougat to make a sweet yet moreish snack."

His wife laughed. "Come on, get thinking."

He grinned as he finished off the chocolate bar, and turned his attention to the conversation. "So, what were we talking about again?"

"A _name,_ John. For the _baby._ We can't just go around calling her 'Baby Girl' all the time. Tony would pick on her."

"Rose, I don't care what we choose for her. No matter what, she's still our baby girl."

"But she'll need one for school," Rose pointed out. "Imagine the teacher doing the register when you're name's 'Baby Girl'." She paused for a moment, and then added quietly, "Are there any customs for naming children where you come from?"

John bit his nail thoughtfully. "Usually the parents will name the child a long and complicated name and then they'll be called by a nickname up until they choose their new name or title."

Rose said nothing for a moment. "Why did you choose Doctor?"

He sighed. "I wanted to help people. And besides, I knew it would irritate my father if I chose a lowly name."

"He was important, wasn't he? Your father?"

John nodded. Rose noticed the pain in his eyes and dropped the topic. She wasn't sure whether he was upset at all he had lost in the war, or whether it ran deeper than that.

She had to ask something. She'd had something on her mind since she'd realised she was pregnant. Something he'd said, all those years ago, back when his hair was shorter and his outfits darker.

"She isn't your first," she stated in the end.

John's breath was ragged. He wouldn't meet her eyes. "My fifth."

Rose struggled to find something to say, something reassuring. But what do you say to someone who's lost four children already?

As it turned out, she didn't need to say anything, because John wasn't finished. "My wife. My first wife. We knew each other as children. We made a childish pact when we were eight that we'd marry when we were older. I went off to one academy, she went off to another. And then, years later, after I graduated . . ."

He laughed, and added, "_Just._ After I _just _graduated, I met her again. I knew her immediately, even though it had been a hundred years or so. And then we got married." He stopped, glancing up at his new love. His forever love. Her eyes were wide, innocent, wondering, beautiful. So he continued.

"Our first was a girl. Maeiarellikenz." The name rolled off his tongue easily, naturally. He hadn't called her by her full name since she had been born, all those years ago. He shouldn't be calling her it now, but he figured no harm could be done. She was dead. He wasn't even a Time Lord any more. Nobody would care.

"Maeia. She was kind, and sweet. Raven-black hair, eyes of the bluest blue. If you shared a cake with her, she'd cut you the bigger half. She was that sort of person. So caring, so understanding. People thought she was quiet, but she wasn't. She just cared too much about people's feelings to say much."

Rose reached over and touched his held. He flinched at first, but let her take it. "And then we had a son. Dekamarusamai. We all called him Nile. He was a genius – way cleverer than I even pretend to be. He could read or hear something and be able to recite it word-perfect. And when a friend of mine brought back chess from their visits to Earth, we'd play together and he'd beat me all the time, even when he was only five."

He stopped, realising who he'd come to. His heart tightened and he wished he had a second one to take over the first's duties. He swallowed, and skipped one, moving on to the latest. "Less than a year before I was born in this body, when I was travelling with Donna, we ended up dragging Martha with us on one of our trips. The TARDIS pulled us somewhere.

"Messaline. A planet at war. They took my DNA and created a fully grown human girl. A generated anomaly." John smiled weakly. "We called her Jenny for short. She was a soldier, born into a war like I was, and like my ninth body was. She was born to fight, and born to die. And die she did. She saved my life. She took a bullet for me. And the trouble was, she wasn't Time Lord enough to regenerate."

He leant back in his chair, finished. Rose looked sad for a moment – sympathetic – but then her forehead creased. "John . . ."

He couldn't meet her eyes. She wasn't an idiot. She could count, and she must have noticed he'd only listed three children.

"John . . ." Gentler this time.

"Maeia, she had a daughter. Nile had a son. My grandchildren. They had more, but I wasn't there to see it. I stole Maeia's daughter." He laughed bitterly. "I wanted to see the universe; so did she. We were kindred spirits, one and the same person. I . . . I forget her real name. I've been calling her Susan for so long.

"We toured the universe for a while, but then we came here. To Earth. 1963. And we needed a break. I enrolled her in school; I parked the TARDIS in an old junkyard. It was about a year before we left. That's when the chameleon circuit broke. The TARDIS changed into a police box that day and it never changed back."

"What happened to her?" Rose whispered.

"A boy called David. Man, rather. Though he was a boy, in my eyes at least. She was in love with him. A grandfather knows. I locked the TARDIS doors, didn't let her back in. She demanded I open them, but I told her no. I forced her to stay with David, to be happy and have the chance to have children of her own.

"I met her again a while later, but only briefly. Next time I saw her . . ." He shuddered, and Rose knew by his pained expression that he was thinking of the War. "Anyway, we still haven't thought of a name."

Three weeks later, John came and perched on the edge of the bed. Rose had baby Lauren in her arms.

"Shh!" she smiled. "I've finally got her asleep."

John beamed. "You'll get the hang of it. You're a great mum."

Their eyes met for a while, and then John took the baby and placed her in her crib. Rose could hear him singing softly – that beautiful angelic song he sang her sometimes. The words were strange and sad – Old High Gallifreyan, apparently – but oddly comforting.

She felt herself drifting off to sleep as John came and lay down beside her. Babies were hard, but she wouldn't trade Lauren for anything in the world. Anything in the universe, in fact.

"What about the fourth?" she found herself asking, just as she was on the brink of dozing off. She felt John stiffen beside her, and she sat bolt upright. She hadn't meant to say that _at all._ "Sorry," she babbled. "Pretend I didn't say anything. I'm really sorry."

He exhaled deeply. "It's okay. It's not healthy for me to keep quiet. Maybe it'll hurt less if I talk about it."

She leant her head on his chest, listening to his somewhat erratic heartbeat. His heart never quite settled down, she'd noticed. Maybe because it was so used to having a twin beside it.

"We called her Cadei, short for Arcadia. Her real name was Jepelacramasilor, but we all hated that. It was a family name, on Essina's side. My wife," he explained in response to Rose's puzzled look.

John glanced over at the sleeping Lauren as he spoke. "She looked just like Essina. Her hair was curly and blonde with a hint of red. Strawberry blonde. Her features were beautiful and angelic, her eyes the same colour as mine are in this body. I . . ." He swallowed and closed his eyes. "It sounds so selfish. Please don't think badly of me. But she was my favourite."

He'd never said those words out loud, never admitted the truth. But she was.

"Cadei was always mine. Maeia had been her mother's daughter. They were like sisters rather than parent-daughter. And Nile . . . Well, Nile was Nile. He read. He played chess. He didn't really . . ." He sighed. "Don't get me wrong. I loved Nile, more than you could possibly imagine. He was my _son._ But it was different with Cadei. She was my baby girl, and she always will be."

Rose moved to kiss him on the forehead, and realised his cheeks were wet with tears. Alarmed, she kissed him anyway.

"When Cadei was six . . ." John faltered.

"You don't have to."

"I _want _to. I need to tell someone." He took a breath and continued. "When Cadei was six, she got ill. Really ill. Her temperature dropped – plummeted – and then soared back up again. She was shaking and vomiting and coughing up blood. We took her to a hospital . . . an intergalactic one. Like the one on New Earth, but even bigger. It's closed down now.

"We took her to hospital. They said she'd been exposed to a toxin and it would most likely kill her. She got worse and worse, and Essina and I were forced to accept the truth.

"Dying's not the same with Time Lords. We were going to get a brand new six-year-old – one with a different face and a different personality. But she'd still be Cadei. Just like I'll always be the Doctor. I was in my ninth body, and I was in my tenth. And even now, I'm still the Doctor really. And Cadei was always going to be Cadei."

His breath was coming in gulps now – he was almost hyperventilating. Tears were pouring freely down his face and Rose had no idea how to comfort him apart from just _being _there.

"We took her home. They couldn't do anything at the hospital. _Just let her die,_ they said. And we accepted it. We let her die. We knew she'd regenerate.

"Essina wasn't there when it happened. We still had two older children, and they needed to be fed and clothed and somehow occupied. So it was just me.

"She was screaming, right at the end. My baby girl, six years old and in _that much pain._ I had to do _something, _but there was nothing I _could_ do. So I sat on the bed with her, her head in my lap. She was shaking so much, sweating so much. And she was so cold. She screamed and she cried and I screamed and cried too, and then her body went completely limp.

"I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. I couldn't call Essina in. So I watched as Cadei changed. Regenerated. Into a little girl with long brown hair – much straighter than before. But I didn't get to know her. Because the hospital was wrong. Because she didn't get better. She got worse.

"Cadei was new. She wasn't Cadei anymore, but at the same time, she _was._ She threw up blood. I was so scared. I stayed with her for fourteen hours, and then she died again. In my arms, just like the first time."

John leapt up off the bed, away from Rose. He began to pace, his cheeks stained with the tears he'd been keeping in for centuries. She could do nothing but watch as her sweet husband unravelled before her.

"My daughter. My sweet baby. She _died _in my arms thirteen times. It took just three days. She went through _thirteen _faces. I watched her take that last breath _thirteen _times. My poor baby, and I had to live through it thirteen times."

His voice became deeper, hollower, gruffer. "A Time Lord has thirteen lives. And no matter how much I loved her, how much I begged and prayed and yelled and screamed, I couldn't change that. A Time Lord has thirteen lives," he repeated. "She died. And came back. And died again. And came back. And died again. And came back. It was torture.

"I tried to kill myself."

Rose felt her jaw drop, and she felt immediately ashamed of herself. In all honestly, if Lauren stopped breathing there and then, she'd jump of a cliff before John could blink.

"My wife stopped me," he continued. "She reminded me that I still had two children. No matter how much I missed Cadei, I couldn't neglect Maeia and Nile because of it. So I locked it all away, in here." He tapped his heart. "I powered on. I was a father to Maeia and Nile. I tried to be the sort of father who would make Cadei proud. And then, when Susan was born, and then my grandson, I was the best grandfather I could be."

He stopped. Stopped talking, stopped pacing, stopped crying. He sat down on the bed and leant back. Rose joined him, neither of them saying a thing. She slipped her hand into his and looked over at him with a slight smile. She saw the light glittered on his wet cheeks and realised she was crying too.

They stayed like that for ten seconds, maybe more, before Lauren joined in the crying, wailing at the top of her lungs.

This time, John got her, singing her the same beautiful song he'd probably sung to his other children, all those years ago.


End file.
